COUNTRY LIFE
BEFORE I turn to a more personal record of country matters, I want to make use of this rare and happy opportunity to pay a tribute to Whuff's master, the habitual writer of this column. His book, The Way of a Dog, is a memorial to all the bucolic friendships that have ever existed between man and dog. So much written about dogs is sentimental slop ; but here is something noble, real, proportionate. What would country life be without the dog ? I cannot imagine it. For service, companionship, in a thousand ways and at all times, the dog and man are inseparable. The association can never be fully recorded ; but I would place The Way of a Dog along with W. H. Hudson's A Shepherd's Life as one of the most satisfying of such records. It is a happy coincidence, too, that The Book of the Dog, a symposium edited by Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, should have appeared recently.
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